Little Sibling
by AliceXOffered
Summary: The group has once again been split up, but this time, Fai is on his own. Young children call a ruined, monster-infested city home, and as Fai delves deeper into the mystery of Eden, he becomes aware of the fact that something is horribly wrong...
1. Night

a/n; Well hello there, readers, and welcome to the completely revamped and re-uploaded version of Little Sibling. There were a lot of reasons for why I chose to start over on this fic, but the main one is definitely the writing itself – I first started this fic almost three years ago now, and given that I was a vastly different person then and just starting out as a fanfiction writer, the story ended up being far below my expectations of quality. My standards have greatly increased since two and a half years ago, and looking back at the earlier chapters of Little Sibling, I couldn't help but feel dissatisfied. And thus, this overhaul has occurred.

Before I begin, I want to apologize to my previous readers of this fic, who have been kept waiting a very long time for it to be continued. A lot has been going on in my life, but I feel like that isn't a good excuse for essentially ignoring this story for months. I said it in the beginning, and I'll say it again – I will _never _abandon this story.

That being said, to old and new readers alike, I hope you can enjoy this new and improved version of Little Sibling, and if you're not too mad at me (or too disinterested, either one), I hope you'll drop me a review. Thank you.

* * *

The darkness stabbed at him like a knife.

He tried to move, to speak, to do anything to drive away the sharp aching of his eyes, yet, nothing – his body was useless, a shapeless contour in the dark. _Where am I? _He thought quietly. _Where is this place…?_

A sudden pain in his wrist cut through the darkness and the throbbing of his head, and his eyes at last flashed open.

Rain. He hadn't noticed it, distracted by the pain he felt, but now he could see it clearly, could feel it as it drenched him with frost-bitten glee. The rain fell in heavy sheets on his face, large droplets illuminated by the pale light of a fat moon staring down at him from the sky, as if they were trying to pin him to the muddy ground.

Said mud painted his pale face as he slowly turned his head, fighting against the aching throb that would have him remain immobile, and tried to find any kind of clue as to where he was. The parts of the ground not covered in mud seemed to be taken up dried, crumpled leaves and clumps of shriveled grass, scattered liberally as if to obstruct his vision, and the various twisting shapes of something he could not immediately define. He squinted through the darkness, the pale moonlight providing just enough illumination for him to make out the gnarled, twisted roots of a long-dead tree, a grotesque husk that seemed to be duplicated throughout the forest he found himself in.

Suddenly, something struck him as being wrong.

It wasn't that the trees themselves felt particularly out of place, despite their grotesque forms, and the ground itself held no secrets for him as far as he could tell. _Then, what was it?_ He asked himself, but no answer immediately came to his fog-laden head. He twisted in place, his mind feeling thick and heavy, thoughts slow as he tried to shake himself of the remnants of sleep.

His movements earned him yet another flare of pain from his wrist, a pain that only worsened when he attempted to move it. He turned carefully to the right in an attempt to discover the cause, only to find that said wrist had somehow gotten entangled in a nasty briar patch, the thorns of which were viciously digging into the soft flesh and drawing a copious amount of blood for its efforts. Carefully, he reached his hand over and started to free himself, the thorns inflicting even more cuts and injuries as he did so, a violent protest against his actions. Eventually, he won the battle and his wrist was freed from its imprisonment, the blood on both his hands mixing together as it was washed away by the heavy rain.

With the pain now subsided, he decided to make an effort to sit up, damp leaves and muddy dirt clinging to the back of his brown petticoat as he did so. His vision danced as a sense of dizziness overwhelmed him for a moment, forcing him to steady himself to keep from falling.

_Where in the world am I…?_

His thoughts felt heavy and slow, as if his mind were trapped in a drug-induced haze, and he had to struggle to recall just where he was and just why he was there. Once again, a feeling that something was very wrong flared inside his mind, causing him to look around. He slowly surveyed his surroundings, the gnarled trees, the crumpled leaves and dead grass, the red dirt…

_Red dirt?_

He blinked, the rain obscuring his vision just a bit, before he began to drag himself across the muddy ground to a bare patch he had spotted. The spot was relatively free of mud and foliage, allowing him to observe the rain-accosted dirt beneath. It seemed normal at first, just a patch of damp dirt of poor quality, but as he looked closer the soil betrayed small patches that gleamed a slimy red. The colour was quickly washed away, as if the rain itself were trying to cover for some sort of crime, but it was too late – he knew what he had seen.

_Blood…,_ he thought slowly. _Fresh blood…_

He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. Something was wrong. Something besides the blood. Why couldn't he think?

He sat back on his knees, staring upwards into the rain, as if the clouded sky may hold some sort of answer to his questions. He blinked into the droplets that attacked his face, soaking his clothing and his golden hair, tracing the stars silently as he attempted to find his answers.

…._stars_?

It was as if a curtain had suddenly been lifted from his mind, leaving it clear and unobstructed. His thoughts returned in full force, and with them the answers that he had been grasping for. _The stars, the moon, the blood…!_

Of course, stars shouldn't be visible during the rain, and neither should the moon, for under normal circumstances they would be covered by the clouds. And yet, they were there – it was the clouds that were missing, the rain falling from empty space as if some mischievous god were throwing water on the world. But why? How?

He looked around once more, hoping for some sort of explanation to go along with his deductions, yet instead he was met with a slight stab of panic as he realized that it wasn't just the clouds that were missing from this world—

_I'm alone,_ he thought. _Why? Where are the others?_ He stood up hastily, nearly tripping over his unused limbs as he turned full circle in his search, half expecting that they would show up just as he did so. They didn't.

Syaoran, Sakura, Kurogane and Mokona were nowhere to be found. He was alone.

Fai was alone.


	2. Scream

a/n; Aaaand we have another one. Because I felt bad about being a month late. D: I'M SORRY. I HAD COLLEGE STUFF GOING ON, OKAY?! *cough* Well, anyways…aside from college stuff, I also took some time out to work on my drawing skills a bit (as in, that's all I've been doing since March), and in the process I managed to create some more 'official' art for this fanfic. So yeah…the links are on my profile page, which will take anyone who cares over to my new deviantArt, where you can look at pretty pictures of Lily in all her blood-covered glory. Oh, and Fai. Fai's there too, just so you know. *cough* Sorta…

Anyways, since I'm hoping this revamp has attracted new readers as well as old, I may as well include some chapter stuff as well (because that's what a/n's are supposed to be for, right?). So yeah…to paraphrase my original a/n, I know it doesn't seem like the story is progressing very quickly right now, but it will pick up during later chapters. Said later chapters will also begin to include the 'horror' element of this mystery/horror, though I'm still wondering on how good a job I've done with it. My mind may be warped, but without illustrations there's only so much it can do on paper. Oh, and to response to a question I've been asked before, this story is taking place at any point between the Oto/Edonis arc and the Acid Tokyo arc. It doesn't really matter when, for reasons that will not be explained until the finale. Also…can I get a review or two? Please? They feed me more than food. ._.

* * *

"So we ended up in different places again..?"

Fai spoke aloud to himself as he leaned against one of the many dead trees around him, his thoughts disappearing into the empty air. He shook his head lightly, trying to clear away the few remaining cobwebs from his mind. "It's happened before, but…back then, I ended up with Kuro-pon. Now, I'm alone. I wonder if the others are on their own as well…?"

He turned his eyes to the cloudless sky, where the heavy rain from before was already pattering out to a pale drizzle. The stars above were shining brighter than ever now, as if the water from before had been seeping into the heavens to dampen their spirits. A fat yellow moon sat serendipitously in the sky like a bloated crystal ball, but it's rough surface held no answers for the magician no matter how many times he scoured its surface, remaining as a baleful reflection in his bright blue eyes. The moon's image quavered quietly there in his irises before he finally sighed and turned his head away.

The missing clouds weren't the only mystery about the world Fai now found himself in. The trees that made up his surroundings were all, as he soon discovered, the same texture of a walnut shell, hard and smooth to the touch. The leaves that covered the ground were like soft, crumpled sheets of paper, and upon looking closer at the water that had accumulated on them he found it to be more of a powdery blue than clear like normal rain.

And the blood.

Looking at the rain-washed splotches of blood he had found gave the magician a bad feeling. It wasn't as if he were afraid – no, he had seen far too much to be afraid of something so simple – but being alone, in a strange world he knew nothing of, with blood covering the ground…it all made him feel very nervous. And what was more…

He looked down at himself, examining the clothes he wore. A brown petticoat, filthy with mud and rain, covered the black turtleneck he wore beneath, which so far seemed undamaged and clean. The same could not be said of his trousers or shoes, both articles of which were just as dirtied as his coat, if not more so. He shook his head.

Perhaps he was mistaken, perhaps he wasn't remembering things correctly, but…Fai was almost _certain _that he had not been wearing these clothes before he came to this world. On the contrary, the last thing he remembered before ending up in this world was jumping into Mokona's mouth wearing the clothes from his original world. And yet now, he was wearing clothes that he had not only never seen before in his life, but which also felt very awkward and unnatural to wear, as if everything were a different size that was just _not quite _right. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to push the clothes from his mind and think about the bigger problem at hand.

_Everything about this place feels wrong…,_ He thought. _The sky…these woods…even myself. The longer I stay here, the more I start to get a horrible feeling about it…maybe I should start looking for the others, after all…_

Fai pushed off from the trunk of the old tree and started to walk away, intending to search out his companions on his own, but before he could even take two steps a thin, high-pitched scream tore through the night and split the air around him. As if on instinct, the magician froze and threw up his hands to cover his ears, the faraway howl sounding as if it were being generated directly next to his head, the torturous shriek piercing through him like a knife. His head throbbed.

What the hell is that?! The singular thought disappeared quickly as the scream grew louder, his vision blurring as he was forced to drop to his knees in pain, fingers digging desperately into his skull. He didn't know who was screaming or why, but _for the love of all that is holy, make it _STOP_—_

And it did.

Just as abruptly as when it came, the shrieking ceased, the air growing still as silence took over at last. Hesitantly, Fai uncurled his stiff fingers from around his ears, dropping them quickly as the pain slowly began to ebb from his throbbing temples.

_What…,_ he thought slowly, a headache rapidly forming to take over for the pain the scream had caused. _What in the world _was_ that? It sounded like a girl's voice…_

A sudden stab of panic overtook him as he thought back to the scream, his mind going back to the moment the shriek had finally been cut off—

Cut off.

_That's right…,_ he thought, the bad feeling from before starting to arise once more. That shriek…it hadn't faded out like a normal scream would. It had just…stopped, abruptly, as if something had stopped it—

A pit of dread began to rapidly form within his chest as images, dark and silent, flashed quickly through his mind: _a faceless girl, a featureless monster, the blood…_

Fai picked himself up and started running toward the source of the scream.


End file.
